Chapter 150: Camp

The path was exactly as wide as it had looked from the shelf, and not a finger wider.

It had been cut straight into the wall of the Abyss by someone with patience and very good tools.

The floor of it was worn smooth in a shallow groove down the middle, where countless feet had walked before theirs. On the left rose the wall, and on the right there was nothing at all.

Rishin led the way with Vina’s hand in his. Solveig walked close behind the two of them with his wings folded tight, so that not even a feather of light hung out over the drop.

Helen and Daniel came next, with Garen at their shoulders. Isolde followed them. Logan and Alice walked behind her, and after them came the long file of units, with Terry at the very back.

The wall beside them was not bare.

Water seeped out of it in a hundred places, thin sheets that ran down the stone and made it gleam. Where the water ran, a dark green moss grew in soft ridges.

Tiny pale snails crawled along those ridges, each no bigger than a fingernail, and their shells gave off the same faint green glow as the caps on the shelf.

Vina stopped to look at one. Rishin let her. He waited with his free hand resting on the wall until she had finished, and then they walked on.

The air grew cooler the further they went. It carried the sound of dripping water and, underneath that, a low steady hum that seemed to come up from the depths of the Abyss itself.

Logan could feel it more than hear it, a faint vibration in the soles of his boots.

Across the drop, the far wall kept pace with them. It was still honeycombed with holes, and every hole still held a small grey shape with its beak turned toward the path.

Billy had the worst of it.

His great wheel was nearly as wide as the path, and he rolled along its outer edge with barely a hand’s width between his rim and the drop. Helen looked back at him once and then refused to look back again.

"I am fine," Billy announced to nobody in particular. "I have excellent balance."

"You nearly went off the platform in Hollowreach," Terry said from the back.

"That was different. I was excited."

"Do not be excited," said Rishin, without turning around.

Billy stopped talking. He did not stop rolling along the edge, but he did it a great deal more carefully.

Helen had not spoken since the shelf.

Logan could see her from behind. She walked with her shoulders pulled in and her eyes on the groove in the path, and every so often her hand drifted to the place on her shoulder where Tavi had been crying.

Daniel walked beside her with his rock in the crook of one arm.

He carried it the way he used to carry a toolbox home from work, as though it had always belonged there. Every so often he shifted it to the other arm without seeming to notice he was doing it.

Eventually Helen looked over at it.

"You kept it," she said.

"It’s a good rock."

"It is a rock, Daniel."

"It is a rock that works." Daniel hefted it thoughtfully. "Everything else I tried did not."

Helen made a sound that was nearly a laugh. It was the first sound she had made since Tavi went up the stair, and Logan felt his shoulders loosen at the sound of it.

’Dad always knew how to do that,’ Logan thought. ’He never fixed anything with words. He just found the one thing that would make her laugh and said it.’

Alice had been watching Rishin’s back for most of the walk.

She lengthened her stride until she was walking just behind Isolde. The path was too narrow to pass anyone, so she spoke over her mother’s shoulder, keeping her voice low.

"Grandpa Rishin."

The old man turned his head a little. Vina giggled at hearing Alice use the name.

"On the shelf," Alice said. "You told Tavi the Abyss does not give back what falls into it."

"I did."

"Is that true? Or is that just something people say on the rim?"

Rishin walked on for several steps before he answered.

"People say it on the rim," he said. "They say it because it is true."

That was all he gave her. Alice watched his hand, the one that was holding Vina’s, and saw his fingers close a little tighter around the girl’s small palm. Vina did not seem to notice.

Alice dropped back beside Logan.

’He did not say it like a saying,’ she thought. ’He said it like a man describing something he watched happen.’

She glanced at Logan. He had heard every word, and he gave the smallest shake of his head.

’Not yet,’ his face said. ’Let him tell us when he is ready.’

The path bent around a shoulder of rock and opened out onto a wide ledge.

It was nothing like the shelf of stalks above. This ledge was bare stone, cupped into the wall like the inside of a bowl.

At its back, a thin fall of water ran down the rock from somewhere high above and collected in a pool the size of a bathtub before it spilled over the lip and vanished into the drop.

Low walls of piled stone stood here and there across the ledge. Most had half fallen down. They were old windbreaks, Logan realized, built by people who had camped here before them and then walked on.

A panel opened in front of him as he stepped off the path.

[ New area: Weeping Ledge ]

"Another one," Garen said, reading his. "We have crossed into a new area."

"Watch the middle," Rishin said.

Logan did not look at the middle first. He walked to the lip of the ledge and looked down.

Below them, the wall of the Abyss fell away in a long uneven slope of rock. Other ledges jutted from it here and there, and many of them glowed faintly green with stalks like the ones on the first shelf.

From above they looked like a scatter of lamps left burning down the side of a well.

On two of those lamps, far below, tiny figures were moving. They were other parties, walking the same wall.

Further down still, the green lights grew fewer and smaller. Then they stopped altogether, and there was only the dark.

’That is only the first layer,’ Logan thought. ’And I cannot see the bottom of it.’

In the center of the ledge, a ring of carved stone lay flush with the floor.

It was smaller than the one in the square at Hollowreach, perhaps three paces across. The symbols around its edge glowed the same pale blue as the lanterns on the rim.

"Every area in the Abyss has its circles," Rishin said. "Sometimes one and sometimes several. When you find a new circle, you know you have crossed into somewhere new."

Helen let go of Daniel’s hand and walked over to it. She crouched down beside the ring, and a panel rose from the circle in front of her.

[ Summoning Circle ] [ Summon: Combat Unit x1 ] [ Cost: 100 Tower Points ] [ Your Tower Points: 20 ]

Helen read it twice. Then she looked over her shoulder at Daniel.

"Twenty," she said. "You?"

"Twenty."

"So we need ten crawlers each," Helen said slowly. "For one."

"Ten each," Logan agreed. "If they all pay ten."

He had been hoping the circles in the Abyss would be cheaper. They were not. It was the same price he had paid in the Warlord match, where he had summoned five hundred units at a time and thought nothing of it.

Helen stood up and dusted her knees.

"Then we had better find ten more," she said.

They made camp on the Weeping Ledge.

Martha and Winsmoke set up at the pool and began filling pots under the waterfall. Baldrun joined them and immediately started a fresh argument, this time about whether the water needed boiling.

Synthia went from one broken windbreak to the next with her hands full of runes, and each wall she touched stood a little straighter.

Vina ate, washed her face in the pool, and fell asleep between her parents with her head on Helen’s lap. Solveig knelt a pace away from her and did not move after that.

Garen and Isolde took the first watch at the mouth of the path. Rishin sat with his back to the rock and his eyes closed. Logan could not tell whether he was sleeping.

Logan found the marks while he was looking for somewhere to sit.

They were scratched into the back wall of the ledge beside the waterfall, at about shoulder height. There were hundreds of them. They were short straight lines, grouped in bundles of four with a fifth line slashed across each bundle.

Some had been cut deep with a blade. Others were barely scratches, made with a stone or a fingernail. They ran along the wall in rows and then spilled up and down it in different hands, one group of marks crowding against the next.

Logan understood what they were before he had finished counting the first row.

’Days,’ he thought. ’Everyone who camped on this ledge stood here and counted.’

Alice came up beside him. She looked at the marks, and then she looked at his face.

"Don’t," she said.

"I was not going to."

"You were." She took his hand. "You were going to find a stone and add one."

Logan looked down. There was a sharp-edged stone lying at the foot of the wall, and he had not noticed his eyes going to it until she said so.

He let it lie.

"Rishin said not to count them yet," Alice said quietly. "So we do not count them yet."

They sat down together with their backs to the wall of marks, facing the pool and the sleeping family and the drop beyond the ledge.

Behind them, the hundreds of little lines went on counting days for people who were not there to read them.